Evolving global strategies for safety and air navigation planning, development and implementation

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ICAO will host the once-a-decade Air Navigation Conference in October 2018, that will bring Member States and aviation stakeholders together to build on ever-evolving global strategies for safety and air navigation planning, development and implementation. The ten-day event will coalesce views of the global aviation community around major objectives for safety and air navigation and set priorities for the coming years.

The theme of the 2018 conference is “From Development to Implementation” which encompasses implementation of operational improvements, such as technology, operational concepts, and roadmaps, from the conceptual phase until deployment. It emphasizes the importance of concepts for global use, development of implementation plans regionally, and implementation of performance improvements locally, based on specific operational requirements in a cost-effective manner

In December, as part of the back-to-back events organized to drive progress on the topics and solutions that will be presented to governments in October,  ICAO’s second Global Air Navigation Industry Symposium (GANIS/2) and first Safety and Air Navigation Implementation Symposium (SANIS/1), took place at ICAO Headquarters in Montreal. State and industry experts reviewed proposals for how to integrate the future air navigation system to accommodate global aviation’s forecast doubling of flights and passengers in 15 years’ time, these results are expected to inform much of the agenda for the 2018 Conference.

When ICAO Secretary General Dr. Fang Liu opened the SANIS/1 event, she pointed to how safety, capacity and efficiency of the world’s aviation network is presently threatened by the speed at which it is expanding. She elaborated that sectoral growth cannot be permitted to negatively impact the key strategic performance targets, and existing levels of aviation safety, efficiency, and environmental protection should continue to trend upward even as operations expand.

Dr. Liu recognized that ICAO’s safety audit programmes have been recording some troubling variations in the State-by-State levels, of effective implementation of ICAO Standards and Recommended Practices, noting that “this variation means that some States are not quite so well prepared as others to take advantage of the economic benefits of aviation growth and development.

She further highlighted that the dynamic whereby States assure ICAO compliance, whether through direct local actions or requests for international technical assistance under the agency’s No Country Left Behind initiative, must begin with their own high-level commitments and demonstrations of political will.